Salesforce.com Launches Software Program for Wearable Devices

The idea of connecting portable devices like watches to marketing databases has for several years caught the imaginations of companies across a broad spectrum of industries including retail and health care. But there’s still a wide gap between the idea and the reality. Salesforce.com Inc., a cloud software maker, is hoping to capitalize on this need with a low-cost approach that could make this technology more accessible.

The company Tuesday launched Salesforce Wear, software and developer tools that companies can use to build business applications for smart glasses, watches and other wearable devices that connect to the Internet. “We want to jumpstart wearable app development,” said Daniel Debow, senior vice president of emerging technology at Salesforce.com. He said Salesforce.com is partnering with Google Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Pebble Technology Corp., Fitbit Inc. and several other companies for the project.

So far the business case of wearables has been made in markets such as professional sports, in the military, and at hospitals. Elsewhere, corporate adoption has been hampered by privacy concerns, uncertainty about business cases, and the lack of apps to run on the devices. Salesforce.com, by getting in early, hopes to help develop and shape that business app market.

Salesforce’s move could accelerate adoption of wearables in the corporate market, analysts say, but it also allows the company to get a jump on rivals such as General Electric Co., Cisco Systems Inc. and other companies that are interested in mining new revenue streams from wearables and other connected devices. Much like how Salesforce.com approached the customer relationship management market over a decade ago, where it brought a cloud-based application suite to market against established packaged software makers, it appears to be doing the same thing in the nascent business wearable market, positioning itself againstsome Internet of Things heavyweights with a platform and a number of applications it believes are likeliest to serve immediate needs. Salesforce is counting on attracting the attention of other application developers to add to the appeal of its platform, much like the company’s current crop of third-party developers have built out its cloud ecosystem.

To help developers visualize the device wearing workforce of the future, Salesforce.com’s developer kit includes a number of reference apps. One, a reporting tool, allows a call center manager to check call volume and other details in real time from a smartwatch or some other wearable. Another app lets users view information about potential clients they’re about to meet with. There’s a hotel check-in app where a customer walks into a hotel and is automatically checked in and notified of their room via the device. Salesforce.com also built an app that enables a worker to access from Google Glass machinery repair history on an oil rig.

Hosted on Salesforce.com’s cloud, Wear will enable developers to build, roll out and update apps faster than on-premise software development, in which testing and bug fixing timelines are longer, said Rebecca Wettemann, a Nucleus Research analyst. “What we’ll see is much faster time to market and a lot more apps that have potential to deliver value,” said Mr. Wettemann. However, she said predicting success is challenging because wearables are still a technology searching for a problem to solve; many devices will fail due to lack of demand.

IHS predicts that roughly 50 million wearable devices will be sold in 2014, with that number rocketing to 180 million by 2018.

Salesforce.com will make money from businesses that connect Wear apps, either reference or custom-built, to licenses for its sales, marketing and other cloud services, said Mr. Debow. He said Salesforce.com will promote Wear at trade events and hackathons.

Mr. Debow said Wear came to fruition over the last eight months after Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff asked him to look into what wearable devices would mean for the company’s customers and — more importantly — what Salesforce.com should do about it.

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